In the last days I’m unable to login into my webmail client, which runs with squirrelmail on a gentoo box.

I have tried to check whats going wrong and googled a little bit around. I have inspect the cookies with chrome and saw, that a (in some posts mentioned) cookie named “key” was never set.

After that, I have start to deactivate some of my chrome extensions and viola … login works again … the problematic extension I have found out was“Simple Adblock” which I have installed in the last weeks.

Now I’m using again “AdBlock Beta” and added my webmail domain to the white list filter.

I opened the archive and extracted the libs libesint66* to /usr/lib/iscan and also the /usr/share/iscan/esfw66.bin

Now I need to register the libraries and scanner binary to iscan:
iscan-registry --add interpreter usb 0x04b8 0x012d /usr/lib/iscan/libesint66.so /usr/share/iscan/esfw66.bin

The next step was to create a file called „interpreter“ in /usr/share/iscan-data/interpreter and adding the lib and binary:
echo "interpreter usb 0x04b8 0x012d /usr/lib/iscan/libesint66 /usr/share/iscan/esfw66.bin" >> /usr/share/iscan-data/interpreter

After that, I was able to start iscan, select the first entry from the founded scanners and start to scan

The last days I need to create a small prototype to demonstrate how to start a eclipse RCP application via webstart. After reading many tutorials and tipps I have now a working setup which I want to share with you.

The main tutorial which I followed was the eclipse help itself. But there are some hidden points which are important to respect.

This plugin will provide the RCP application with a small demo UI. In a larger project you will normally have more than one plugin. But for demonstration proposed this would be enough.

From the eclipse main menu, go to File > New > Project… (the New Project wizard opens), select Plugin-in Development > Plug-in Project

Press Next > enter „org.test.webstart.demo.plugin“ as Project name

Press Next > change the Version to „0.1.0″

Press Next > select RCP application with an view > press Finish

At this point you should have a small RCP „application“ which can started from eclipse. Select the project root > select Run from the menu > select Run As > Eclipse Application. Now you should see the demo UI.

Next we need a Eclipse feature project which uses the plugin.

Create eclipse feature which contains the plugin and a reference to the eclipse rcp feature:

We need a feature which depends on the demo plugin and on the eclipse rcp feature. The dependency to the eclipse rcp feature is required to export later all required plugins and features for webstart, to run the complete rcp application.

In the eclipse main menu go to File > New > Project… (the New Project Dialog opens), select Plug-in Development > Feature Project

Press Next > enter „org.test.webstart.demo.feature“ as project name > change the Version to „0.1.0″

The feature editor opens. Now you need to add the eclipse rcp feature as included feature. To do so select Included Feature tab in the feature editor > add „org.eclipse.rcp“ as feature. Save and close the feature editor.

This feature contains now all you need to run your application as a full featured eclipse RCP application. Now we need another wrapping feature to get the Webstart launcher on board.

Create wrapping feature for webstart

This feature will be used to export all required JAR files with the eclipse java webstart exporter into a local filesystem.

From the eclipse main menu select File > New > Project… (the New Project Dialog opens), select Plug-in Development > Feature Project

Press Next > enter „org.test.webstart.demo.wrapperfeature“ as project name > change the Version to „0.1.0″

Press Finish. The feature editor opens.

Now we need a dependency to the equinox launcher plugin and include our own feature.

As a final step you need to create your entry JNLP file which is the starting point of your webstart application. Here is an example for start.jnlp:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<jnlp
spec="1.0+"
codebase="http://localhost:8080/demoui-webstart"
href="start.jnlp">
<information>
<!-- user readable name of the application -->
<title> Demo UI Application </title>
<!-- vendor name -->
<vendor>Me</vendor>
<!-- vendor homepage -->
<homepage href="http://www.me.org" />
<!-- product description -->
<description>description</description>
<offline-allowed/>
</information>
<!--request all permissions from the application. This does not change-->
<security>
<all-permissions/>
</security>
<!-- The name of the main class to execute. This does not change-->
<application-desc main-class="org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.WebStartMain">
<argument>-nosplash</argument>
</application-desc>
<resources>
<!-- Reference to the launcher jar. The version segment must be updated to the version being used-->
<jar href="plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.201.R35x_v20090715.jar"/>
<!-- Reference to all the plugins and features constituting the application -->
<!-- Here we are referring to the wrapper feature since it transitively refers to all the other plug-ins necessary -->
<extension
name="Wrapper feature"
href="features/
org.test.webstart.demo.wrapperfeature_0.1.0.jnlp"/>
<!-- Information usually specified in the config.ini -->
<property
name="osgi.instance.area"
value="@user.home/Application Data/demoui-rcp"/>
<property
name="osgi.configuration.area"
value="@user.home/Application Data/demoui-rcp"/>
<!-- The id of the product to run, like found in the overview page of the product editor -->
<property
name="eclipse.application"
value="org.demo.webstart.plugin.application"/>
</resources>
<!-- Indicate on a platform basis which JRE to use -->
<resources os="Windows">
<j2se version="1.5+"/>
</resources>
<resources os="Linux">
<j2se version="1.5+"/>
</resources>
</jnlp>

Some remarks according the main JNLP file:

You need to adjust (or take care) of the lines 04, 30, 36, 48.

Line 04 defines the codebase. Every time you want to deploy you application on an websever you need to adjust the codebase (in every JNLP file in your project!) to the web application location.

Line 30 depends on you eclipse distribution (I have used eclipse 3.5 with some updates). You have to check the right version in your plugins folder and update the start.jnlp file.

Line 36 defines the starting feature JNLP file. This file itselfs refers to the other JNLP files in the features folder (which is automaticly done from the eclipse exporter). You need to adjust this line if your project name differs from this example.

Line 48 defines the entry point to your application. This is the application ID from the example plugin. You can find the ID if you open the plugin editor of your example plugin. To do so open your example plugin and open the plugin.xml file. Under the tab Overview you can find the ID: „org.demo.webstart.plugin“. Now you also need to open the tab Extensions. Under the Extensions Details you can find the ID of your application. The complete application ID which you need to refer in the JNLP file is then „org.demo.webstart.plugin.application“.

If you now put the main JNLP file and the plugins + features folders under an webserver which delivers the files from http://localhost:8080/demoui-webstart/ you can see your test application. You should have following structure:

Hint:
A small problem over which I stumbled while developing the example application:

If you start the application and you get from webstart a exception that plugin with *wpt* are not found, you can have a look into the JNLP files in the features folder. Some of these files define resources which are not exported by the eclipse webstart exporter. I have simple removed these resources from the JNLP files and it works.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 24,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 5 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 6 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 28 posts.

Apache maven enforcer rules are very useful in large projects. A common usage of such enforcer rules is to define them in a central point like a project parent pom.xml. For example following enforcer definition can be set in a pom parent:

Columba – Java based EMail-Client honoured by big IT Magazin in Germany

As anybody knows I’am a Co-developer for the last years for a Java based EMail client called Columba. Now the program was honoured by the big german IT magazin Heise.

The last moths, there are no more many code changes in the project and I can say the project is dead (from the developer point of view). I have learned many about open source programming, Java coding and got new friends in this project. It was very funny to work on this EMail client!

Now we got after many years good feedback for our work and it is nice to see that the project still have users which are like this kind of EMail client.

Today I found the time to fix a problem in testopia – the mozilla test extention for Bugzilla.

The problem was, that we where unable to attach files to a test case in the testopia extention. After some research I found out, that the tr_attachment.cgi module uses the Testopia:Attachment perl module to do the database stuff.

I have changed to too simple database insert statement to a more secure prepared statement which uses the type BLOB for the contents and it works perfekt.

To get the fixed file you can download it from the original bug 576524.